Thomas Hart Benton: Popular Culture

Home , Blonde Venus, George Petty, In Old Chicago, Jupiter and Io, Persephone (painting), Rolf Armstrong

Louise Haven Ashley

2015

THOMAS HART BENTON: POPULAR CULTURE

AND THE AMERICAN NUDE

Louise Haven Ashley

ABSTRACT

My research examines four artworks by the American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton that offer different depictions of the nude and semi-nude female: the America Today (1930-31) mural series, Hollywood (1937-38), Susanna and the Elders (1938) and Persephone (1938-39), all from the 1930s. Benton’s interest in the eroticized female body, influenced by popular culture, is evident in these works. I propose that Benton incorporated the visual cues of pin-ups and “pretty girl” imagery into the iconography of Persephone to create an inherently American nude, so that his American aesthetic might compete with the European tradition. Through a feminist analysis, I will examine the reactions that women and men had, and may have towards the sexualized female body used in advertising, film, and print media during the 1930s. My research concludes after examining Benton’s eroticized interpretation of the originally violent

Greek mythology and Apocryphal narratives that inspired Susanna and Persephone.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... iv

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 CONTEXTUALIZING BENTON'S INTEREST IN THE EROTICIZED FEMALE BODY...... 6

CHAPTER 2 CREATING THE AMERICAN NUDE: AN APPROPRIATION OF 1930S POPULAR CULTURE ...... 16

CHAPTER 3 MYTH, NAKEDNESS, AND THE MUSEUM: ISSUES OF RAPE AND VOYEURISM IN PERSEPHONE AND SUSANNA...... 34

CONCLUSION...... 47

ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 50

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 52

iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Thomas Hart Benton, Persephone, 1938-1939, Egg tempera and oil on linen over panel, 72 1/8 x 56 1/16 (183.2 x 142.4 cm), Kansas City, Missouri: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art...... 50

Figure 2: Thomas Hart Benton, Susanna and the Elders, 1938, Egg tempera and oil on canvas mounted on panel, 60 x 42 in. (152.4 x 106.7 cm), San Francisco, California: de Young Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco...... 50

Figure 3: Thomas Hart Benton, “City Activities with Dance Hall” from the America Today Mural, 1930-1931, Egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panel, 92 x 134 1/2 in. (233.7 x 341.6 cm), New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art...... 50

Figure 4: Thomas Hart Benton, “City Activities with Subway” From the America Today Mural, 1930-31, Egg tempera with oil glazing over Permalba on a gesso ground on linen mounted to wood panel, 92 x 134 1/2 in. (233.7 x 341.6 cm) New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art...... 50

Figure 5: Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937-1938, Tempera over casein underpainting on canvas mounted on panel, 56 x 84 in (142.2 x 213.4 cm), Kansas City, Missouri: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art...... 50

Figure 6: Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Antiope (also called Venus, Satyr and Cupid), 1523-1528, Oil on canvas, 74 x 49 in, Paris, France: The Louvre...... 50

Figure 7: Rolf (Jack) Armstrong, Venus, 1934, Original location unknown...... 50

Figure 8: Earle K. Bergey, Untitled,1 934-1936. Original location unknown...... 50

Figure 9: Earl Moran, Grin and Bear It, 1937, Illustration for the Combination Door Company...... 50

Figure 10: Earl Moran, Some Baby, 1939, Illustration for Metal Crafters...... 50

Figure 11: Students and Faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1907, original location unknown...... 50

Figure 12: Unknown artist, Billy Rose and a chorus girl pose with Persephone at the Diamond Horseshoe, 1941, original location unknown...... 50

Figure 13: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Thomas Hart Benton Painting the Rape of Persephone, 1938, Gelatin silver print, 10¾ x 9½ in, original location unknown...... 51

Figure 14: Peter Driben, Untitled, ca. 1940s, original location unknown...... 51

Figure: 15 Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Io, 1530, Oil on canvas, 163.5 cm × 70.5 cm (64.4 in × 27.8 in), Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum...... 51

Figure: 16 Roy Best, Untitled, ca. 1930-1950, original location unknown...... 51

Figure: 17 Art Frahm, Untitled, ca. 1935-1960, original location unknown...... 51

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Hart Benton, Missouri's own “prodigal son” and patron saint of the rough-and- ready-hard-drinking-artist, is remembered as a clever and boorish man, a painter whose prolific oeuvre has left us with a unique vision of American life. At times prone to pontificating, especially under the influence of drink, and often seduced by fame, Benton remains a curious case whose work and remarks remain multivalent. Benton, like his fellow Regionalists Grant

Wood and John Steuart Curry, were concerned with establishing an American pictorial tradition through artwork that reflected the American people and landscape. That is, communicating the

American experience to viewers by way of “trademark American subject matter” and making it easily accessible, financially and physically, to as many people as possible, not just the educated museum audience.1

While the influence of popular culture upon Benton's work is the linchpin of this study, I am especially interested in Benton's interpretation of the eroticized female body. My thesis examines four artworks by this American Regionalist that represent several different depictions of the nude and semi-nude female: the America Today mural series (1930-31), Hollywood (1937-

38), Susanna and the Elders (1938), and Persephone (1938-39), all pieces from the 1930s.

Persephone and Susanna are of special interest, considering their similar compositions and subject matter. While their imagery can be differentiated in complex and disturbing ways, they both participate in a dialogue of oppositional concepts—naked versus nude, art versus obscenity—and prompt viewers to question Benton's interpretation of ancient narratives concerning rape and voyeurism, which he has presented in an eroticized manner.

1 Leo G. Mazow, "Regionalist Radio: Thomas Hart Benton and Art for Your Sake," The Art Bulletin 90, no. 1 (2008): 105.

My study of the attitudes toward women in the 1930s aims to reveal the cultural and visual influences that likely fueled Benton's work. Representations of ideal 1930s femininity were available in several forms of popular media, including not only idealized advertising images but also “girlie” cartoons, “cheesecake” imagery, and pin-ups, which each reflected aspects of the societal values, anxieties, and ideas of acceptable (yet constructed) femininity in circulation at the time. Examining the 1930s advent of mass-produced, sexualized female imagery in publications such as Esquire magazine and “pretty girl” artwork from artists like Jack

Armstrong, Benton's old friend, has further allowed me to clarify Benton's motivation for appropriating the pin-up.

While notable Benton scholars such as Henry Adams and Justin Wolff have recognized the connections between Persephone and the pin-up, it is not yet understood why Benton would turn to such sources, or what his motivations were.2 Throughout this study, I aim to clarify

Benton’s possible interests in appropriating the pin-up, proposing that Benton referenced this particular type of imagery to create an inherently American nude—or even a Regionalist nude— in order to further his goal of constructing a truly “American” pictorial tradition. In order to truly equalize himself with the European tradition with which he had broken, I believe Benton needed to create a large scale female nude. Thus, with Persephone, Benton courted high and low culture, owing a debt both to pin-up imagery and to the European nude tradition. For in Persephone, we see a nude reclining not upon a luxurious interior à la Titian, but next to a creek-bed in a bucolic

Midwestern landscape. In this painting, Benton sought to exploit a nuanced distinction between art high and tawdry popular culture, competing with, and poking fun at, the nudes created by old masters such as Titian and Correggio. Although Persephone references traditional idealizing

2 Justin P. Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 265, and Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original (Kansas City, Mo.: Trustees of the Nelson Gallery Foundation, 1989), 287. 2

images of the nude, Benton has swapped a Grecian maiden for a raven-haired calendar girl.

Given its ties to popular culture, my study of Persephone also provides an opportunity to scrutinize Benton's willingness to commercialize his work. As an artist concerned with promoting an American style, pin-ups may have appealed to Benton as an amusing, American interpretation of the female body.

Chapter One provides an introduction to Benton’s career and contextualizes his interest in the female body throughout his oeuvre. Through this chapter I will establish Benton’s personal interests during this historical moment and discuss his contributions to the Regionalist movement and his commitment to recording America's folklore and mythology. Chapter Two conducts an examination of 1930s popular media and the ways in which it likely influenced Benton’s work, and establishes a framework for understanding Benton's later depictions of the female nude. In

Chapter Three I will consider Benton’s paintings Persephone and Susanna, both inspired by ancient lore and updated by Benton to include the trappings of 1930s womanhood. Given that these two paintings are the main focus of my study, it is important to be clear about their visual details and background narratives. Persephone recalls the myth of Pluto and Persephone, where

Pluto, God of the Underworld, kidnaps Persephone, who is then allowed to return to Earth for half a year annually, bringing with her the springtime season. In the painting, we see Persephone as a curvaceous nude woman in a pin-up reminiscent pose, reclining besides a stream in a rural environment. Pluto, is the guise of an elderly farmer, peers at the Grecian maiden from behind a tree. Susanna similarly tells of an ancient narrative, this one from the Apocrypha, in which the young Susanna is spied upon and slandered by town Elders when she refuses their sexual advances. Under Benton’s hand, Susanna is depicted as a full-frontally nude figure, less glamorous in appearance than Persephone, yet equally provocative with the inclusion of her

natural, highly visible, pubic hair. In the painting, Susanna is positioned to lower herself into a stream, either to bathe or skinny-dip, while the two Elders observe her in the distance.

Persephone and Susanna represent the culmination of Benton’s interest in provocative female figures, and were preceded by his portrayals of seductive women in the America Today murals and his earlier painting Hollywood. Tellingly, Hollywood, Benton's image of tinsel town, was rejected by LIFE magazine (the patron of the painting) for publication.3 It was not the glittery fairy-tale of American cinema that LIFE magazine’s editors had hoped for—he peeled back the glamour of Hollywood's carefully manicured facade, revealing an industry, not a fantasy.

Hollywood, along with Persephone, Susanna and the Elders, and two panels from Benton's

America Today mural (City Activities with Dance Hall and City Activities with Subway) demonstrate not only Benton's fascination with the sexualized female body, but a testament to his willingness to reproduce and revise social constructions of womanhood.

In Persephone and Susanna, Benton has given classical myth and apocryphal narrative a contemporary spin. Although both paintings feature a nude woman, Benton's portrayal of the goddess Persephone gives an obvious nod to the sexualized images of women circulating through 1930s popular culture. Susanna, however, presents viewers with a more troubling image of a sagging body, depicted in full frontal nudity and with highly visible pubic hair. Thus, the specific relationship between Persephone and Susanna—their similarities and troubling differences—needs to be discussed. In question are the canonical precedents that Benton joins with his eroticized interpretation of Greek mythology and Apocryphal stories that involve rape and voyeurism. Both of the paintings feature voyeuristic men eyeing a woman’s revealed body: in Persephone we see Pluto in the guise of a farmer, and in Susanna, the two Elders regard her

3 Erika Lee Doss, Regionalists In Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925-1945. PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1983. (ProQuest Publication No. 8404149): 151. 4

from behind the trees. The paintings, created as Benton himself looked upon a nude model, feature the male gaze in several ways: their creation, subject matter, and audience, which allow the viewer to assume the role of the spying males in both paintings. It is necessary to discuss the sharp manner in which Susanna and Persephone's bodies contrast when juxtaposed, considering that in their ancient narratives, Persephone (who Benton painted as the more seductive of the two) suffers rape at the hands of her abductor. While Susanna on the other hand, is shown as married (in keeping with the Apocryphal tale) but less glamorous, with yellow-gray skin and without the coy pose. The inclusion of Susanna's soft stretch of pubic hair further raises questions about the assumptions Benton was making regarding the types of female bodies that circulated in sexualized print media and film. This also calls for consideration of the possible reactions that both men and women living during the interwar years felt towards the subject matter in Benton's paintings.

CHAPTER 1

CONTEXTUALIZING BENTON’S INTEREST

IN THE EROTICIZED FEMALE BODY

Remembrances of Thomas Hart Benton tell of a man with a sharp wit and waggish humor, an artist who charmed as easily as he offended. Benton's work crackles with a pulsing energy, painted in a style that is realist yet abstract, with figures both statuesque and rhythmic.

Benton was an integral (and certainly the most vocal) member of the Regionalist triumvirate, which included John Stuart Curry of Kansas and Grant Wood of Iowa, respectively. Benton was careful to perpetuate his own mythology as a fiercely individual and gruff Missourian, a hard- drinking, no-nonsense man. He often played the role of the bully: sharp-tongued and stubborn,

Benton was grounded in his convictions and often cut himself off from former friendships and professional positions when his interests shifted. Throughout his lengthy career, Benton demonstrated his commitment to recording America's folklore and mythology in his myriad depictions of the American scene, from wheat fields to nightclubs.

Merging the Modern with the Bucolic

My study of Benton is concerned with ways in which Benton merged his interests in both the modern and the bucolic, specifically in two paintings of “modern” female nudes in rural settings, Persephone [Figure 1] and Susanna and the Elders, [Figure 2] and how Benton used this blend of cotemporary and ancient subjects to create an American nude. The female figures in these paintings, which were inspired in their subjects by ancient lore, have been updated by

Benton to include all the aspects of 1930s womanhood, from finger-waved hair to varnished nails. While several scholars have acknowledged the similarities between Persephone and

images of women in pin-ups and calendar art, Benton’s motivations for appropriating the pin-up have remained unexplored, until now.

While Benton is typically considered a mid-western artist, he in fact spent a large portion of his career in several important artistic centers outside of Missouri. Before moving to Kansas

City in 1934, Benton enjoyed a cosmopolitanism lifestyle in the bustling cities of Chicago and

New York. After a stint in Paris from 1908-1911, where he toyed with bohemianism and modernist abstraction, he settled in New York and remained there for fifteen years. While active in the Regionalist movement, critics scorned Benton for abandoning New York City for

Missouri; in the eyes of the artistic elite, the Empire State held more cultural capitol and opportunity for growth than the mid-west. Benton chose to work in a representational style throughout his career, even as other artists gradually shifted towards an interest in color, abstraction, and expression rather than narrative, beginning in the late 1930s.

Before arriving at his signature style, Benton incorporated a myriad of influences on his painting technique, from Tintoretto to El Greco. Benton's break with the School of Paris occurred in 1918, while he was working as a draftsman at the Norfolk Naval Base.4 Scholar

Matthew Baigell believes that in Norfolk Benton identified with the town's rural inhabitants.

Here, the friendly small-town folk offered a sharp contrast to the cold New Yorkers to which

Benton was accustomed. After spending time in Norfolk, a town that emphasized community,

Benton became enraptured with his family's personal history (his father was a United States

Congressman, his grandfather a Missouri senator) and with American history at large. Benton began painting not only the past, but also the events occurring around him—living history. He departed from his experimental paintings of geometric shapes and Synchromist abstraction to move towards the subject matter that would come to define his career: the American scene.

4 Matthew Baigell, “Thomas Hart Benton in the 1920s,” Art Journal 29, no. 4 (1970): 422-29. 7

Benton Puts His Ideas Into Practice

However, one could argue that at his core, Benton was not only an artist who was interested in both modern and rural America, but one who wished to represent beauty.

Underneath Benton's sometimes biased politics and his loud mouth demeanor, his critical mud slinging and his anti-intellectual facade, this focus was a fundamental part of Benton's identity.

Through his lyrical, rhythmic brushwork and an interest in both modern life and rural inhabitants emerges his vision of America The Beautiful—a vision that critics often scorned as escapist or even naively idealistic. While Benton did not hesitate to paint tense moral themes, evidenced by his paintings of plantation workers in Weighing Cotton (1939), one merely has to look at photographs by the Farm Security Administration to understand the differences between

Benton's representation and the stark reality of cotton farming.5 Often, naysayers censured his art for ignoring the suffering of so many Americans during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl era, but Benton typically preferred to paint what he knew or experienced personally, which did not include the bread-lines, poverty, or dust storms that plagued the country during the 1930s.

Benton enjoyed enormous popularity with the general public, who found comfort in his depictions of an idyllic America. In 1934 he became the first artist to grace the cover of TIME magazine, calling attention to the Regionalist movement with his brooding self-portrait. Thanks to his mass consumer appeal, Benton maintained financial stability throughout the Depression, even without aid from government-sponsored programs such as the Works Project

Administration (WPA). Akin to his fellow Regionalists, Benton left it to the artists of the Farm

Security Administration (FSA) and the WPA to record harsh Depression realities.6 To achieve

5 Helen A. Cooper, "Thomas Hart Benton, "Weighing Cotton,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1990): 80-86. 6 Elizabeth Broun, "Thomas Hart Benton: A Politician in Art," Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1 (1987): 59. 8

such wide appeal, Benton took care to cultivate an image of himself as a gruff, single-minded individual—a true American. Thus, Benton sought every opportunity to place his art inside the

American home.

With the acumen of a seasoned businessman, Benton employed two main strategies for marketing his art to a large audience, by providing an opportunity for viewers to appreciate his art with their eyes and ears. Benton participated in public radio programs that were broadcast across the country, painted public murals, and offered lithographic prints in store and by mail through the AAA (Associated American Artists.) Before his venture into radio, Benton had already begun to place his art easily into the hands of everyday Americans. In 1934, American artists were desperate to sell their work. After a watershed meeting with the founder of the AAA,

Reeves Lewenthal, that occurred in Benton's own New York studio, Benton and others agreed to create lithographic prints of their work, editioned in sets of 100-250 impressions and sold for

$5.00 a piece.7 In the nascent days of the AAA, the prints were available only through department stores, of which Lewenthal had contracted fifty by October 1934 to sell his company's prints. Six months later, after the initial success of selling the prints through department stores had slowed, Lewenthal opted to eliminate the department store middleman, in exchange for a business model that allowed for production, marketing, and distribution on its own terms. Now that the company was a mail-order business, consumers were able to send off for an AAA catalogue offering forty original etchings by thirty-six artists.8 Such blatant catering to consumerism outraged galleries, which ceased to represent many artists who signed with the

7 Erika Lee Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 161.

8 Ibid., 158.

AAA.9 In an age of economic turmoil, many artists, including Benton, felt that they did not have much to lose by agreeing to sell more lithographic prints of their work rather than one-of-a-kind canvases.10

By choosing subject matter that was not out of reach intellectually, and creating art that was financially and physically accessible, Benton was successful in marketing his art to a large audience. From his AAA prints to his public murals, Benton selected subjects in which he himself believed “Americans would find an opportunity for genuine spectator participation,” drawing on America’s cultural conscience to emphasize interconnectedness and national identity.11 In time, Benton became the AAA's best-selling artist and remained with the company through the 1970s, due in part to the company's promotion of easy to understand, easy to consume American art. Accepting representation under the AAA also allowed Benton and other artists (Regionalists especially) to secure lucrative advertising commissions from enterprises as diverse as Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company. Benton himself created artwork to be used in the advertisement of Lucky Strike Cigarettes.12 Scholar Erica Doss suggests that

Benton was optimistic about the potential for “big money and art” to have a fecund partnership, believing that mass communication created community.13 However, Benton's eagerness to merchandise his work to the general public may have over-saturated his market, so to speak.

9 Ibid., 157.

10 Ibid.

11 Leo G. Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 128.

12 Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism, 166.

13 Ibid., 166-7.

In the year 1940 Benton's personal and artistic philosophies were broadcast across airwaves and into American homes by way of the National Broadcasting Company. Despite the rough-and ready, folksy reputation that he perpetuated, Benton was an intelligent man interested in new technologies. Scholar Leo G. Mazow argues that Benton’s interest in using the radio as a new method of reaching consumers was an extension of his established interest in sound, demonstrated by his frequent use of sonic imagery.14 Mazow explains that On January 6th 1940 an “elaborate dramatization” of Benton's career aired on Art For Your Sake, a radio program that sought to foster a sense of stability during the turbulent post Depression years, demonstrating to the general public the role of art in establishing a cultural identity.15 Benton's participation in the radio program not only broadened the audience for his art; it provided a platform for Benton to accentuate the difference between himself and other artists with differing ideologies and styles.16

Benton and Contemporary Ideals of Female Beauty

In support of his interest in pioneering a new national artistic language, Benton repeatedly explored strategies for depicting the sensual “American” female body throughout his career. Works such as his America Today mural series from 1930-31 [Figures 3 and 4] represents the beginning of my study on Benton's varying depictions of sensual women. The New School in

New York City commissioned Benton to create the mural, a series of ten panels which was installed in the university's boardroom. Several figures in the mural—a flapper, a circus performer, and a woman riding the subway, to name a few—demonstrate Benton’s fixation with

14 Mazow, Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound, 122-127.

15 Leo G. Mazow, "Regionalist Radio: Thomas Hart Benton and Art for Your Sake," The Art Bulletin 90 (2008): 102.

16 Ibid. 11

sexualized female bodies. In the early 1930s Benton had not yet achieved the celebrity he enjoyed in the latter half of the decade, nor was he recognized as a muralist. Benton, believing murals to be an attractive means of involving the public in the arts, undertook the commission with gusto. Completed with feverish energy in only nine months, the mural touches on all the trapping of the gritty, tireless metropolis known as New York City. In the mural we see a violent clash of geometric forms and riotous color, the picture planes cleaved by overlapping narratives illustrating America's progress. It is a spirited depiction of 1920s America, imagined with women in varied performative acts such as swinging from a circus trapeze and dancing on tables at nightclubs. Yet even as it is celebratory of the developments of urban life, in today’s eyes the piece seems wary of industry and overproduction (evidenced by the looming smog clouds), thus bringing to mind other politically minded muralists of the 1930s, such as Diego Rivera.

In addition to the America Today mural cycle, Hollywood [Figure 5] stands as another work that combines Benton's interest in modern America and women's function within it as a provocative presence and fetishized object. Hollywood was not the glossy fairy-tale of American cinema that LIFE magazine, which commissioned the painting, had hoped for; instead Benton peeled back the layers of Hollywood's carefully manicured facade, revealing a fastidious artifice.

For the painting does not linger on the glamour and romance of Hollywood cinema, rather, it presents the subject as a machine with various working parts. In response, LIFE magazine’s editors rejected Benton’s image of tinsel town for publication.

Hollywood and the America Today murals demonstrate the broad scope of subject matter that Benton depicted throughout his career, from bucolic scenes of farmhouses to the gritty and gray industrial landscape. As a Regionalist, certainly Benton did enjoy painting the subjects of the American heartland, but he was interested in recording all aspects of American life and

politics. Benton brought together elements of a heterogeneous national identity in his art, creating a space where industry, agriculture, and politics combined to form his trademark of distinctly American imagery. In Benton’s artwork, diverse facets of life in America, from the circus to the cinema, coalesce. However, Hollywood along with the America Today mural also establish Benton's interest in the female form and in contemporary representations of female sexuality.

For this aspect of my study (Benton’s representations of female sexuality) my primary focus will be on two additional paintings by Benton that are complex examples of the female nude in his oeuvre: Susanna and the Elders and Persephone. By focusing on these two works, both created in the late 1930s, I aim to better understand Benton's desire to create contemporary studio nudes by examining his decision to draw on popular culture for inspiration when representing the sexuality and glamour of the 1930s woman. Throughout this study, I will clarify

Benton’s motivation for appropriating the pin-up, arguing that he wished to further establish his interest in constructing a fully American pictorial tradition with a new conception of an

American nude—or even, a Regionalist nude. Exploring the cultural and visual influences that fueled Benton's work, including “girlie” cartoons, cheesecake imagery, and pin-ups, will reveal important aspects of 1930’s attitudes towards women. Cheesecake imagery usually refers to a genre of imagined scenes where a man could conceivably “happen upon” a nude or nearly nude woman. Popular cheesecake situations include an artist painting a model, a woman changing clothes, or a naked woman about to bathe—as we see in both Persephone and Susanna.

Thematically, both Persephone and Susanna present us with a visual compendium of symbolism and iconography, drawn from the Western nude tradition, ancient lore, and modern life. Here, Benton has given both classical myth and apocryphal narrative a contemporary spin.

Justin Wolff has pointed out that a 1939 LIFE article suggests that Benton consulted Greek mythology and the Apocrypha in search of allegorical subjects to update and place in a Missouri setting.17 Additionally, Benton was a friend to Jack Armstrong, an artist who specialized in

“pretty girl” and calendar-girl art. Furthermore, Benton's own work was advertised in widely circulated magazines. Thus, it would have been difficult for Benton to be unaware of images of the new woman circulating in the media from magazines to movies, and evidenced by the contemporary inspiration visible in Persephone herself.

Although both paintings feature a nude woman, Benton's portrayal of the goddess

Persephone gives an obvious nod to 1930s popular culture, while Susanna presents viewers with a more troublesome image. Each painting features a woman on a riverbank, stripped nude under the pretense of bathing, whether by water or sun. The apocryphal and mythical source material behind the paintings tell of a woman spied upon without her knowledge, in both cases with malicious intent. Thus in both paintings Benton also included voyeuristic male figures who eye the women’s revealed bodies. In Susanna and the Elders, Susanna seems truly unaware of her onlookers, while Persephone's pin-up reminiscent pose makes her more available to the voyeuristic (male) observer. Unlike Susanna, Persephone is in a reclined position, a compositional strategy used by Benton to present viewers with an unobstructed view of her body, which is more sexualized and inviting to the lecherous Pluto. What also sets the two nudes apart is the fastidious attention to Susanna's pubic hair, which in combination with her full- frontal nudity shocked female and male viewers alike when Benton first showed these works.18

The distinction between nude and naked comes into play with the high visibility of Susanna’s

17 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 265.

18Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 290.

pubic hair (which is nearly indistinguishable in Persephone) and reminds us how complicated the question of the intended gaze is, whether it be male or female. There is a strong parallel between the voyeuristic gaze in Persephone (and Susanna) and the implied voyeurism of pin-ups and calendar art. By trading a Grecian maiden for a raven-haired calendar-girl, Benton created a painting that is self-referential in its voyeurism: the visual narrative in Persephone is a reflection of the popular culture that likely inspired the artist.

For Benton, an artist concerned with promoting an American style, pin-ups may have held appeal as a fresh, American interpretation of the female body. In the following chapters I will discuss the relevance of contemporary pin-up imagery to an understanding of Benton’s interest in portraying Persephone and Susanna, analyzing their myriad similarities and distinct differences, and questioning the success of Benton’s borrowed pictorial devices, which were both appealing and shocking to contemporary viewers.

CHAPTER 2

CREATING THE AMERICAN NUDE: AN APPROPRIATION

OF 1930S POPULAR CULTURE

Prior to the advent of Regionalism and Social Realism, Benton was certainly not the only artist seeking a style to best suit the American experience. The years leading up to the

Depression saw what scholar Matthew Baigell refers to as an “American wave:”19 an age of artistic reinvention intent on abandoning its lineage as heir to a European tradition by expressing a uniquely American spirit through forms of realism accessible to a mass audience. Artists active during this time, including Benton and Edward Hopper (among many others) believed in the possibility of another American Renaissance, a movement that would compete with—or even surpass—European artistic achievement.20

Thomas Craven and the Call to Create an “American” Art

The writings of critic Thomas Craven were a clarion call to some American artists, urging the younger generation to cease their usage of techniques born from European movements. In Craven’s version of the ideal America, it would be better to have more “nameless illustrators” rather than an “army of imitators of Matisse and Picasso.”21 Thus, Craven dismissed art reminiscent of modernist technique acquired from Cubism, which he believed to be symptomatic of an old European value system.22 Benton’s friendship with the acerbic critic was an empowering yet ultimately a compromising influence upon the artist’s career development

19 Matthew Baigell, Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.

20 Ibid., 82.

21 Thomas Craven, Modern Art; the Men, the Movements, the Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934), 261.

22 Baigel, Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, 82. 16

and public persona. Craven’s anti-Semitic prejudices also placed Benton at risk of being considered a bigot by association. Yet, Craven’s opinions on European art align with Benton’s own dismissal of the European school, and Craven’s enthusiastic promotion of Benton’s work appealed to the recognition-hungry Regionalist. Craven hailed Benton as building “an art of and for the American people.”23 Craven’s writings about the snob spirit make clear his position that artists did not need to travel to Europe in search of something to paint. He wrote “For the genuine artist, America holds an unprecedented variety of experiences, an untilled field of overwhelming richness.”24 Craven doubted whether European art, which lavished its attention on technique, could as effectively express the human experience. In the eyes of Craven and other

1920-1930s artists and critics, the European school was producing art about art, not about life.

Several major art publications of the 1920s, including The American Magazine of Art and The

Art Digest, mirrored Craven’s conservative, anti-bohemian opinions and growing Francophobia in the years preceding the Depression.25

The subject matter that occupied many American painters after World War One was, surprisingly, neither aggrandizing nor overtly patriotic. Rather, paintings of this period often depicted a stark and neglected urban landscape that reflected an overall mood of social isolation.

Moreover, until the emergence of Regionalism and Social Realism, Baigell argues, it was difficult for artists across the United States to develop, secure, or even agree upon an American style.26

23 Craven, Modern Art; the Men, the Movements, the Meaning, 343. Craven described Benton as what he believed to be a true American, possessing “the rawhide individualism, the cynical laugh, the rough humor, the talent for buffoonery, and something of the typical Westerner’s sentimental slant of life.”

24 Ibid., 270.

25 Baigell, Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America, 81-97.

26 Ibid. 17

Benton's career-long goal centered on the pictorial recording of American culture and the establishment of an American aesthetic, an aesthetic clearly different from the European tradition but certainly no less important: a tradition equal in artistic achievement and cultural value.

Although his paintings and murals explore varied subjects of social and political history, one additional way that Benton pursued this goal was to address subjects in European painting that had been afforded important canonical value, such as the female nude. Benton seems to have viewed the importance of the female nude as a cultural touchstone, one that could provide for his

American audience either an equivalent to (or an attack on) the sensuous female bodies created by old masters such as Titian and Ingres. As Henry Adams notes, for his painting Persephone

Benton borrowed the composition from Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope [Figure 6]. When one views Persephone, the influence of pin-up images immediately comes to mind through the visual cues in her pose and contemporary stylization. What other method could as effectively update the classical myth than to give the Grecian maiden a contemporary makeover, complete with a modern hairstyle, pose, and setting? Thus, as Adams observes, Benton was able to both pay homage to old master nudes and attempt to surpass the lowbrow connotations of the calendar girl art he references, by poking fun at the “sexual urges” that likely inspired the old master paintings.27 Adams does not look beyond the humor to question why Benton would choose contemporary imagery inspired by pin-up girls and calendar art in general. By referencing a contemporary popular culture vocabulary for depicting an eroticized female body, Benton may have been attempting to reach a mass audience through a uniquely American aesthetic. The sharp-witted artist may also have been suggesting a comparison between painters leering at their models, and viewers leering at naughty pin-up magazines.

27 Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 287. 18

Benton, Movies, and the Making of Hollywood

Benton’s paintings of the late 1930s, including Hollywood, Persephone, and Susanna and the Elders, reveal an interest in the female nude and an influence from film as well as from pin-up artwork. Benton did not have to look far to discover these options for portraying a contemporary American nude, because the 1930s decade was saturated with sexualized images of women, from film to print, all offering a variety of socially constructed and culturally manufactured standards of female beauty and behavior. During the 1930s, actresses like Mae

West and Ginger Rogers dazzled audiences on the silver screen in films such as I’m No Angel and Top Hat, while the succulent drawings of pin-up girl artists popped off the pages of Esquire,

Screenland, and other “girlie” magazines. In both Hollywood and Persephone, Benton references the typical 1930s Hollywood “sexpot” female in the pose and styling of his nude figures. By using easily accessible content pulled from films and advertising, Benton also secured for himself a means of enticing the masses—not just the educated elite—into viewing his work.

Benton’s Hollywood was certainly not the only Depression artwork that paid homage to the movie industry. Film culture captivated Americans throughout the 1930s and several artists incorporated the film industry into their compositions, including Reginald Marsh, who painted

Paramount Picture (1934) and Twenty Cent Movie (1936). Both of Marsh's paintings and

Benton's Hollywood suggest the pervasive nature of the film industry and its function as an essential element of mainstream American life. Despite, or perhaps because of, the widespread economic turmoil of the Depression, movies enjoyed regular, enthusiastic attendance from thousands of Americans each week.28 Attendance at movie theaters experienced a surge, rather than a decline, in 1930, even after the realities of the stock market crash had settled in. “Between

28 Julie Human, "A Woman Rebels? Gender Roles in 1930s Motion Pictures," The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 98, no. 4 (2000): 406.

sixty and ninety million” Americans attended the movies each week, writes Julie Human, author of A Woman Rebels? Gender Roles in 1930s Motion Pictures.29 Films served as the perfect medicine to assuage the anxious minds of 1930s moviegoers: they provided a cure-all for the suffering masses, offering messages of hope and perseverance in addition to entertainment.

Thrilling, imaginative, and at times brassy, films like Frankenstein (1931) and King Kong (1933) provided viewers with a brief fantasy world, free from grim Depression realities. The 1930s film industry experienced a fruitful decade of technological developments in the form of lighting, cameras, and film. Technicolor, a revolutionary color film technology, was widely used by 1928, and continued to be improved during the 1930s, allowing brilliant (if slightly garish) colors to saturate the screen.

The film industry also allowed for the wide circulation of models of acceptable femininity. 1930s films offered a cornucopia of female character tropes: the sexpot, the fallen woman, the “girl-next-door”, the careerist, the temptress, and the screwball comedian. In

Benton's Hollywood and Persephone, these clichéd characteristics emerge in the poses, hairstyles, and overall appearance of his leading ladies. These gestures served to reinforce socially imbedded gender roles of the 1930s and may have been a symptomatic of the decade’s so-called “masculine crisis,” where patriarchal authority was threatened by the economic and personal turmoil of unemployment and the possibility of relinquishing the status of family breadwinner. Women who were fortunate enough to secure employment outside the home often encountered resentment from men, regardless of the fact that women seldom replaced men in typically male fields.30 Film served as an outlet both to express social anxiety and provide

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

examples of how women should behave, and the repercussions of breaking with the customary gender roles. As examples of this phenomenon, Julie Human discusses Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus and Katherine Hepburn in A Woman Rebels, just two films (of many) that explicitly demonstrate that for all the strength a female character might have demonstrated, her career and dignity were cast to the side in exchange for the love of a man.

In Benton's painting, women are sought after, rescued, and ogled by men, a strikingly accurate reality of the 1930s film industry, which reinforced existing gender roles. Throughout

Benton’s painting Hollywood, he demonstrates an interest in the eroticized female figure, expressed by the bountiful, scantily clad blondes scattered throughout the composition. Certainly the central blonde figure in Hollywood exudes a commanding presence. She is capturing the attention of the man who kneels before her (perhaps in the act of proposing?) yet the fact that we see her in relation to a man is significant. Julie Human's scholarship makes plain the fact that while actresses in the 1930s experienced great financial and creative success, claiming the top billing in many productions and acting in career-defining roles, female characters in Depression- era movies were not as liberated as they appeared.31 Actresses in the 1930s, from Bette Davis to

Jean Harlow, may be remembered for demonstrating striking verbal dexterity,32 but countless films ended with a woman in the arms of a man.33

Originally, Benton’s painting Hollywood was commissioned by LIFE magazine’s editors in the summer of 1937 to be featured in the magazine. The editors of the enormously popular weekly were supportive patrons of the arts from the 1930s to the 1940s, frequently including

31 Ibid., 408.

32 Philip Hanson, "The Feminine Image in Films of the Great Depression," The Cambridge Quarterly 32, no. 2 (2003): 117.

33 Human, "A Woman Rebels?”, 408. 21

coverage of Regionalist artwork in the magazine’s content. Just three years earlier, in 1934,

Benton's own self-portrait graced the cover of TIME magazine, whose editors hailed him as the leader of the young Regionalist movement. LIFE also served as a movie magazine for many readers, providing stories, glamorous portraits, and film stills amongst its pages, a true tribute to

Hollywood's screen Gods and Goddesses. On newsstands the faces of actors and Hollywood personalities peered out from 250 of LIFE’s total 1,864 covers, a testament to the magazine’s dedication to the movie industry.34

While fulfilling this commission from LIFE magazine, Benton spent the majority of his time sketching at the studio of Twentieth-Century Fox. His ensuing painting of Hollywood shares several similarities with 1930s film besides the obvious visual congruence between

Benton's female figures and popular starlets of the age. In Hollywood (as well as in scenes from his America Today mural) time and space are not fixed, mirroring the reality of Hollywood movies: scenes are shot at different times and places before they are edited together to create the illusion of a cohesive, chronological story. Hollywood shows the fractured reality of this type of film production process.35 In the painting multiple narratives unfold simultaneously: a quartet of blonde beauties preen themselves in the hair and makeup department, while on one stage an

American Indian threatens a distressed damsel. In the foreground yet another honey-haired siren relaxes, topless, in a cheesecake pose reminiscent of the glossy stills of Hollywood starlets.

Benton’s representation of overlapping backdrops creates a confusing, layered sense of space within the painting: a slender minaret peeks out from behind an unused slab of wooden greenery while the city of Chicago seems to burn in the distance. The fire was likely conceptualized after

34 Doss, Regionalists In Hollywood, 124.

35 Ibid., 130.

he witnessed the production of In Old Chicago, which was being produced by film mogul Darryl

Zanuck during that same summer.36 The ceiling in Hollywood opens to reveal three Fresnel lanterns, casting a bright glow over the central blonde actress with the customarily even, nearly shadowless light that illuminated movies in the 1930s.37 Benton's glamorous ingénue, similar in appearance to Kansas City's own Jean Harlow (who died in 1937, the year of Hollywood's creation) pulls our focus to her sculpted physique. This woman directs our eye, by way of her saber, across the painting. In the midst of a screen test, she is clad in no more than a bustier and bikini-style panties. She represents the sum of Hollywood's peroxide princesses— interchangeable actresses of the bombshell blonde variety, with arched eyebrows and finger- waved hair. In the foreground alone there are seven sunny-haired actresses, a homage not limited to Mae West, Ginger Rogers, Alice Faye, and the late Jean Harlow—Hollywood’s golden

(haired) era.

In Hollywood, Benton expressed a jittery sense of energy and motion through strong vertical, horizontal, and curving lines that overlap, criss-cross and direct the eye across the buzzing, “organized” chaos. According to Benton himself, he intended to reveal “the combination of a machine and sex that Hollywood is.”38 Here, Hollywood is depicted as an industry, and one not so different from the steel mill he depicted earlier in the Steel panel of his

America Today Mural. Despite Hollywood's matter-of-fact presentation, Benton created the image on positive terms: it was an image of Americans hard at work, yet another attempt by a

Regionalist artist to offer viewers a positive vision of the present and hope for the future.

However, LIFE magazine was not pleased by his mechanized depiction of tinsel-town. It was not

36 Ibid., 136.

37 Ibid., 131.

38 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 284.

glamorous or magical, and therefore, LIFE refused to publish an image of the painting. It was not until one year later, after the painting received the “Popular Prize” at the Carnegie International, that the magazine afforded the painting publication inside its glossy pages.39 Even then, Benton's painting was not presented as a documentary record of Hollywood. Neglecting to mention to readers that the magazine itself had originally commissioned the artwork, Hollywood was reproduced merely as a prize-winning painting that LIFE did not claim as its own.

The Influence of Pin-ups on Benton’s Pictorial Imagination

Representations of objectified images of women during the Depression decade did not stop at the film industry. Print sources, especially those featuring a pin-up aesthetic, were a pervasive, everyday aspect of popular culture that Americans brought into their homes. Benton was likely attracted to the pin-up aesthetic for its place in American illustration history and contemporary popular culture. For this discussion, the term “pin-up” refers to its historical definition as an attractive image that showed the entire body of a woman, not just her face or torso. In addition, “pretty girl” artwork refers to mainstream illustration that featured the

“glamour” girl as subject, i.e. a woman in an evening gown, or perhaps (just) a coquettish fur coat. The term Glamour Art is also sometimes used to describe an image of a woman who seemed exotic and mysterious. When comparing Benton’s figure of Persephone with the sexy imagery circulating in the 1930s, the visual correlation is immediately apparent. Illustrations such as Venus by Rolf Armstrong and an untitled work by Earle K. Bergey [Figures 7 and 8] are two examples of pin-up and glamour art published between 1934-1937 that bear similar characteristics to Benton’s representation of the mythological figure as a “centerfold”-type goddess. The centerfold, first introduced in a LIFE magazine image of a Gibson Girl, was

39 Doss, Regionalists In Hollywood, 151. 24

especially important to mainstream magazines such as Esquire, which published its first centerfold in the late 1930s, and later, in Playboy. In Esquire, a centerfold was a large two-page illustration, usually stapled or stitched into the magazine on the left side of the illustration, allowing for the artwork to be detached and “pinned-up.”40 During the 1930s, magazines such as

High Heel and Snappy featured titillating content, from kittenish illustrations to alluring photographs of the year’s most popular starlets. After men returned from the first World War, the success of pin-up imagery soared as the homecoming soldiers brought back naughty Parisian postcards, eager for an American counterpart.41

The increased demand for pin-up and pretty girl artwork opened up other commercial opportunities for illustrators, including pulp magazine covers, paperback novels, collectable postcards, advertisements, and of course, calendars. Calendars were by far the most widespread method of reproducing pin-ups and pretty girls, followed by their use on magazine covers. Most often, these types of calendars featured an art print that was attached to a single-sheet calendar, and the largest of these single-sheet calendars, called “hangers,” were often found in factories and workplaces where hundreds of workers could easily gaze upon the coy illustration.42 Two examples of illustrations from typical advertising calendars [Figures 9 and 10] exemplify this imagery. They were distributed by ordinary commercial enterprises, the Combination Door

Company and Metal Crafters. Both calendars were illustrated by Earl Moran, an Iowa-born pin- up artist who, like Benton, studied at the Chicago Institute of Art. Notably, these two calendars feature women in poses reminiscent of the attitude in which Benton chose to portray Persephone.

40 Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up (London: Taschen, 2002), 32- 42.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid, 33.

Of course, it is unlikely that Benton viewed these particular items, as they advertise businesses in

Wisconsin and Iowa, but they are typical examples of the type of imagery that enjoyed wide circulation before and during Benton’s effort to create thematic female nudes in an American context.

Both calendars were published by Brown and Bigelow, the foremost publisher of pin-up calendars in the United States. Founded in 1896, Brown and Bigelow soon became a burgeoning business that attracted the attention of artists around the country. The company was an influential force in the development of American pin-up artwork, commissioning work from the most talented pin-up artists (such as Rolf Armstrong) and thereby elevating pin-up artwork from dodgy magazines to mainstream circulation. The first and most iconic American pin-up girl, the

Gibson Girl, created by Charles Dana Gibson and first published by LIFE in 1887, was a result of the new demand that Brown and Bigelow created.43 By the 1930s, the pin-up aesthetic had become an integral part of American popular culture, with these types of images decorating the walls of garages, factories, and bedrooms, aided by subscription-based magazines like Esquire, which thrived during the Depression thanks to the need for inexpensive entertainment.

The advent of Esquire, the first American men's lifestyle magazine, provided further support for these types of sexy advertisements, cover art, and cartoons that typified the 1930's use of sexualized female bodies to sell products, to amuse, and, ultimately, to arouse. Launched in 1933 by David Smart and William Weintraub, Esquire Magazine promoted an idealized upper middle-class lifestyle to its customers. However, the topics it discussed (food, drink, decoration, and entertainment) were implicitly associated with housewifery. The restructuring of this aspect of 1930s domestic popular culture to focus on masculine rather than feminine superiority in taste

43 Martignette and Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up, 34-35.

is discussed at length by scholar Kenon Breazeale, who argues that the content of Esquire magazine, from image to text, was devised to give men a feeling of masculine authority over areas that women had previously laid claim to, including “apparel, food, [and] decor.”44 The magazine overturned ideals of feminine domestic control, suggesting to male readers that women as consumers were lacking in up-to-date taste.

To take on this re-education project, Esquire needed to represent women in a particular way, and to displace gendered connotations so that the magazine did not appear to be homosexual in nature. Once the magazine decided to feature cheesecake images, it also needed to distinguish itself from the working class connotations of masturbatory aids.45 In the history of

Western culture, images of nude figures have typically been placed into two categories: fine art and pornography. Breazeale argues that Esquire's solution was to embrace both, creating in its content a dyad of high and low culture by juxtaposing titillating imagery with “substantial” articles.46 Thus the genius behind Esquire’s popularity lay in the ability of its founders to market to (male) consumers a naughty magazine that could be placed on the coffee table, not stowed under a mattress.

Pin-ups and Gendered Responses

Sexualized media extended from advertisements and girlie magazines into other forms of popular culture—even cartoons—which, as part of the country's social fabric, projected cultural norms and values. Scholar Heather Hendershot demonstrates how these niches of popular culture

44 Kenon Breazeale, "In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer," Signs 20, no. 1 (1994): 10.

45 Ibid., 11.

46 Ibid., 1-20.

are not simply entertainment, but “bound up in issues of race, sex, and class.”47 Considering that women were the sexualized subjects of the popular media this discussion has addressed, it is important to consider the reactions that women felt towards such eroticized depictions of their gender. Pinpointing women's reaction to pin-ups and girlie magazines is a difficult task, as anecdotes and evidence are often conflicting. On one hand, many pin-up images present us with beamish images of happy, pretty girls, but we must be careful to recognize them as commodities intended for male consumption.

The case of Hannegan v. Esquire is one such example of the conflicting responses women held towards pin-ups and girlie magazines. In 1946, the editors of Esquire found themselves wrapped up in legal proceedings as the case Hannegan v. Esquire came before the

U.S. Supreme Court. The case arose in the early 1940s, after continued protest over Esquire’s content (especially its famous “Varga Girl” pin-ups by Alberto Vargas) caused

Frank C. Walker, Postmaster General, to refuse second-class postage to the magazine.48 After open hearings, and a two-to-one vote in favor of Esquire by the Post Office board, Walker upheld his position, and the case came before the Supreme Court. Unanimously, the Supreme

Count agreed that the Postmaster General did not have the power to evoke such censorship.49

What remains interesting about this case are the witnesses that testified during the early Post

Office hearings, for they reveal the conflicting responses women had to pin-up imagery. Joanne

Meyerowitz provides two examples in her scholarship of the women who testified for Esquire and the Post Office board, Edith B. Cook and Rae L. Weissman. Cook argued that

47 Heather Hendershot, "Secretary, Homeaker, and 'White' Woman: Industrial Censorship and Betty Boop's Shifting Design," Journal of Design History 8, no. 2 (1995): 118.

48 Joanne Meyerowitz, "Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-Twentieth Century U.S," Journal of Women's History (1996): 15.

49 Ibid., 15-16.

images of semi-nude women were emblematic of progress—a move forward from dour Victorian manners. She called the images in Esquire “very attractive” saying “we are used to seeing those things.”50 Weissman seconded Cook's claims, believing that “women would derive a deep sense of gratification” in seeing the female body depicted so beautifully.51 The only witness against Esquire was a member of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Anna Kelton

Wiley, who held firm in her belief that Esquire contained content that degraded women. Wiley believed that the material in Esquire was at odds with the sacrifices that past women's movements made to gain equality.52 To Wiley the pin-ups in Esquire were not examples of harmless cheesecake that men and women alike enjoyed, like Weissman and Cook argued, but debasing images of women whose entire point was the “lure of sex.”53 Of course, Weissman and

Cook both ignored Esquire's inherent “gender asymmetry:” women were portrayed semi-nude by men for (heterosexual) men, and not the other way around.54

Many women might identify with the coquettish grin of an idealized female on a calendar or magazine cover, which lure the female viewer into believing that if they were more like the perfected illustration, if they wore the same clothing and make-up, they too could be as successful and lovely.55 Janice Winship urges us to remember that even though women may in some form relate to the women depicted in print media, there exists “a man” in between the

50 Ibid., 16.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid., 17.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 18.

55 Janice Winship, Inside Women's Magazines (London: Pandora, 1987), 11-13.

image and the viewer, the person for whom their gazes truly exist.56 In the 1920s, advertisers appealed to female consumers with more and more eroticized images of women to sell products as banal as soap. Even the Ladies Home Journal included in its advertisements images of semi- nude women to sell products to a female audience.57 Magazines bombarded women not only with idealized images of femininity, but advice concerning their appearance as well—all in efforts to either keep or obtain a fellow. A 1932 issue of Woman's Own reminds women that

“Looks Do Count After Marriage,” instructing readers that after waking up and fixing breakfast for their “lord and master” (whether this phrasing is satirical is difficult to ascertain, in today's eyes it seems downright comical) they need to carve out a little time for self-beautification in order to leave him with a good impression for the day!58 Magazine publishers were correct in assuming that women could be persuaded to purchase products sold to them from sexualized images of women.

Organized groups of women made efforts to resist the blatant sexualization of women in consumer and popular culture. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, the General

Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC) protested “suggestive stories in magazines” as well as

“obscene literature.”59 However, on the other side of these protests were groups of women in the

1920s who defended erotic art, which of course forced these groups to separate what they considered art from obscenity. Objects such as “obscene post cards” were, well, obscene.60

56 Ibid., 11.

57 Meyerowitz, "Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material,” 12.

58 Winship, Inside Women's Magazines, 19.

59 Meyerowitz, , "Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material,” 14.

60 Ibid., 12.

Scholar Joanne Meyerowitz observes that regardless of women's differing opinions, by 1930,

“scantily clad women were ubiquitous in the popular culture,” including the content of magazines marketed to women.61

Pin-up Imagery and Benton’s Friendships

In addition to the myriad influences of popular culture in wide circulation through films, advertisements, and magazines like Esquire, Benton held personal connections to calendar girl art as well. Benton attended the Chicago Art Institute with Rolf Armstrong, a pioneering artist in the genre of glamour art. Following the year 1919, after Armstrong's successful pretty girl artwork Dream Girl marked the debut of his first calendar with Brown & Bigelow, Armstrong's luminous portraits echoed and influenced the age’s standards of feminine beauty throughout his career. In June 1907, at age eighteen, Rolf Armstrong enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute under the name Jack Armstrong. Now known as Jack, he took up residence in an old brownstone on

Michigan Avenue with two other art students, Bob Levett, and Bill York, to be joined several months later by Benton.62 A photograph of the students and faculty of the Chicago Art Institute taken in 1907 provides a curious juxtaposition between Benton and Armstrong, who were opposites in personality, physicality, and circumstance [Figure 11]. The tall, lithe figure of

Armstrong stands next to the short Benton, with an arm cast around Benton's shoulder. In the Art

Institute’s group photograph, Benton's brooding expression typifies his disposition as a slightly eccentric artist, emphasized by his baggy clothing—usually a pair of peg-top corduroys.63 In

61 Ibid.

62 Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 30.

63 Ibid., 31.

addition to the roomy corduroys, Benton often wore a derby hat over his shaggy hair during his years at the institute, sometimes provoking sarcastic comments from passers-by who did not, according to Benton, appreciate his self-styling as an artist-genius.64 Benton and Armstrong lived together only a year before Benton rented himself a single room on the South side of

Chicago, to “be alone and nurse my conceptions of myself without interference,” Benton later explained in his autobiography.65 Despite their differences, the two young men were equally confident in their ability to succeed as artists. They presumably remained in touch for many years, considering that scholar Henry Adams, referring to their relationship during the 1930s, described Benton and Armstrong as old friends.66

As an artist interested in mass appeal and the establishment of an American style,

Benton’s attraction to pin-up imagery operated on several levels: not only were pin-ups and pretty girl artwork popular, to Benton they may have projected an air of “American-ness” by embodying the fashion and beauty standards of the age. By borrowing elements of sexualized imagery from pin-up illustrations to create in Persephone an American nude, he referenced the female nude as a cultural touchstone, instilling his new pictorial tradition with its own genre of seductive female energy. Benton’s references to pin-up artwork therefore deserve a deeper understanding: his use of these figural types were not simply based on a humorous inclination to tease American viewers’ reverence for the (European) female nude. Rather we should understand his appropriation of popular culture as both a means to pique the interest of a wide audience by using visual cues with which they were familiar, and also the strategy of a clever artist

64 Benton, An Artist in America, 32. Benton recalled an afternoon when a group of young women jeered as he walked by: “Look at that crazy freak!” The next day, Benton wrote, he attended class with newly shorn hair and reserved his quirky artist uniform for wear on the school's campus.

65 Ibid, 32.

66 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 287. 32

attempting to construct a new possibility for Americanizing the western tradition of portraying the female nude. A reference to pin-up artwork helped Benton live up to his billing as both a highly regarded fine artist and an artist who wanted art to be accessible for all.

CHAPTER 3

MYTH, NAKEDNESS, AND THE MUSEUM:

ISSUES OF RAPE AND VOYEURISM

IN PERSEPHONE AND SUSANNA

Susanna and Persephone both carry a legacy of controversy, from their content to their exhibition and reception. It is important to examine the subject matter of Persephone and

Susanna, which is inherently voyeuristic (and in the case of Persephone, makes an allusion to rape) in order to better understand why the paintings received such adverse reactions by the public, museum officials, and critics. Given the salacious and violent nature of the mythological and Biblical stories that inspired the paintings, it is important to explore the layered meanings that the goddess Persephone and the Biblical heroine Susanna may have represented to viewers, both women and men. Furthermore, the compositional strategies that Benton used in his two paintings need to be discussed within the context of the art historical precedents he joined by eroticizing such violent subject matter.

Controversies Surrounding the Display of Susanna and Persephone

Discomfort with the sensual intensity of both the Susanna and Persephone paintings is evident from documented concerns expressed by various individuals when they were exhibited.

And it was not just museum attendees who were unsettled or worried by the content of the two paintings. In one case, the director of the City Art Museum of St. Louis was leery of showing

Susanna at all. Although Susanna was previously exhibited in New York at the Whitney

Museum of American Art in 1938, the painting was nearly rejected in 1939 for display in St.

Louis by Meyric Rogers, the City Art Museum’s director.67 According to Rogers, Susanna was

“very nude.”68 He decided to display it anyway, but only with a velvet rope in front of the painting, so that viewers would not get too close to it, or look too closely. However this did not appease all viewers; after visiting the exhibition, a woman named Mary Ellis exclaimed, “The

Nude is stark naked… [it’s] an insult to womanhood and the lowest expression of pure filth. It leaves nothing to the imagination.”69 To which Benton replied, “That’s funny as hell.”70 Viewers like Ellis were likely disturbed by the thought that Benton could imagine such an atrocity taking place in their quaint Midwestern towns. Bram Dijkstra sums up these kinds of responses, commenting that “Benton had brought complex suggestions of potential sexual violence into their favorite myths regarding rural Midwestern virtue.”71 This shocking idea, in combination with Benton’s unabashed presentation of Susanna and Persephone’s nude bodies, likely made viewers uncomfortable.

Persephone also experienced a colorful exhibition history which Benton deemed a

“public adventure.”72 In a testament to his belief that art should be easily accessible and museums were dead, Persephone—as an example of merging of high and low art—came to hang at a venue that exemplified exactly this combination once the painting was installed: the

Diamond Horseshoe, a saloon owned by the infamous Billy Rose.73 Benton, encouraged by

67 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 264.

68Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 290.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid., 291.

71 Bram Dijkstra, Naked: The Nude in America (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 236.

72 Benton, An Artist in America, 281.

73 Ibid.

bourbon and emboldened by being in the limelight, remarked to a group of journalists “I would rather exhibit my pictures in whore houses and saloons where normal people would see them.”74

Thus, after hearing of Benton’s bold statement, nightclub owner Billy Rose soon phoned Benton and arranged to have the seven-foot nude hung at his saloon.75 An amusing photograph of Rose standing beside a buxom chorus girl while admiring Persephone at the Diamond Horseshoe demonstrates how life tends to mimic art—and vise versa, of course [Figure 12]. When looking at the photograph, one sees double: two curvaceous figures with dark curls, with scantily clad (or nude) bodies, are available to be gazed upon by an older man, whether it be the God Pluto or

Billy Rose. In the photograph, Benton’s modern allegory has come full circle.

During the years when Benton painted his “two too-nude nudes,”76 and shrugged off these types of public responses, he also faced more serious repercussions that affected his career.

In 1938, he found himself under fire from Howard E. Huselton, the Art Institute’s second director.77 After obtaining a copy of Benton’s 1938 edition of his autobiography, Huselton announced it to be “blasphemous, lewd, [and] lascivious” referring in particular to a passage describing a prostitute.78 The artist’s insistence on stating his ideas without self-censorship began to have profound effects on his professional life. Hired as the head of the department of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1935, Benton found his position on rocky grounds after

Huselton began a campaign to oust him. When it came to a vote, the board did decide to reappoint Benton as head of the department. However several years later in 1941, after Benton

74 Ibid.

75Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 292.

76 Ibid., 284.

77 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 270.

78 Ibid.

made cruel, unprofessional, and obtuse remarks against homosexuals in the art world, his allies and students were not able to save him from dismissal at the institute.79 Thus, these examples demonstrate Benton’s outspokenness and willingness to offend both his audiences and colleagues, which eventually led to his professional ostracization by many of his peers in the art community.

Pluto and Persephone: a Myth Suited to the 1930s and Benton’s Biography

The ancient Greek myth that underlies the subject matter depicted in Persephone carries an eerie resonance not only to the current crisis in American agriculture in the 1930s—it also parallels Benton’s biography through the act of its creation and through a possible reference to a sexual escapade of his youth. Thanks to an article published in 1939 by LIFE magazine titled

“Thomas Benton’s Nudes People the Ozarks,” it is known that Benton sifted through Greek mythology and the Apocrypha in search of subjects to update into a modern midwest setting.80 It is fitting that Benton chose Persephone. Her mother Demeter, often called the corn goddess, serves as the perfect patroness for agriculture in the Middle West.81 However, Persephone also invites speculation about his motives for choosing to paint such a specific nude woman.

What significance could Benton have given to portraying this mythological goddess?

Sarah B. Pomeroy, author of Goddesses, Whores, Wives, And Slaves, believes that goddesses serve as archetypal depictions of mortal females, noting that in the pantheon of goddesses, appealing personality characteristics are distributed individually throughout many goddesses,

79 Ibid., 271.

80 “Thomas Benton’s Nudes People the Ozarks” LIFE magazine, February 20, 1939, 38.

81 Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 40.

rather than a singular goddess possessing a collection of desirable traits, which would allow her to be equal with Zeus or Apollo.82 Instead, each goddess represents a singular trait: Athena is a wise intellectual—perhaps today’s ambitious career woman, as Pomeroy suggests. Aphrodite,

Goddess of love and beauty, is the typical sexpot. Demeter, goddess of motherhood and fertility, is the loving mother and housewife.83 These ideas are congruent to the gendered roles and fractured identities that women faced in the 1930s, represented in movies and print, which were discussed in the previous chapter.

Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of nature and fertility, whose kidnapping by Pluto and return from the underworld for half of each year was used by ancient

Greeks to explain the changing of the seasons. Benton's choice to paint the moment just before

Persephone’s abduction by Pluto, with its potentially disastrous consequences for agricultural productivity, is significant considering the nation's state of agricultural distress in the 1930s.

During the Depression and the crisis of the Dust Bowl, other artists depicted the earth as barren—raped even, yet Benton’s landscape in Persephone is lush overall, save for one area of red soil. By contrast, Alexandre Hogue’s Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936), with its drought- eroded bare dirt, is one such example of the landscape portrayed as a victimized female body during the 1930s. Perhaps the lush foliage in Persephone was optimistic. To the 1930s audience, the painting may have also appeared hopeful given the symbolism of the elderly farmer making such a happy discovery on his farmland: a young, “fertile” woman rather than withered crops or another symbol of agricultural failure. Persephone was the harbinger of spring: allowed to return to Earth for half of the year, the appearance of Persephone signaled a new cycle of agricultural

82 Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 8-9.

83 Ibid.

growth. Painted at the close of the “dirty thirties,” the overall fertile landscape in Persephone may be a symbol of hope, and depicting this mythic story may have been an attempt to assuage farmers’ anxiety about the continuing risk of unfruitful harvests. The fact that Pluto is dressed as a farmer (one who stumbles upon the beautiful daughter of the goddess of fertility in human form) is significant: myths about resurrection, including the return of Persephone to her mother for half the year were linked to ancient “rituals designed to promote the revival of vegetation.”84

Painted near the end of the Dust Bowl’s tragic destruction of American farming in much of the midwest, and complete with a small threatening patch of red infertile soil, Persephone may have been intended in part by Benton to express his hopes for rebirth and regeneration.

In addition to the mythological symbolism for farming in America, Benton clearly had other motivations to portray Persephone as a naked and nubile young woman, being observed by

Pluto, fashioned as a curmudgeonly old farmer. The visual narrative Benton has constructed allows for the viewer, especially a male viewer, to identify with Pluto as a voyeur. Although the elderly farmer hardly appears adequate as a stand-in for a powerful god in the Greek mythological universe, his figure does allow the male viewer to assume spectatorial mastery over

Persephone’s nude body. This metaphorical transference is even more troubling when one considers the physical similarities between Benton himself and the aging farmer.

A photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1938 titled Thomas Hart Benton Painting the Rape of Persephone, shows Benton in the act of creating Persephone, painting from a nude model who reclines against cloth-covered crates, arranged to tip her body upwards [Figure 13].

This positioning allowed Benton to paint the figure of his Goddess so that the viewer may also have an unobstructed view of Persephone’s entire body. The photograph captures a striking

84 Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, 41.

parallelism, because just as Pluto appraises Persephone, Benton appraises his model. Caught with a tobacco pipe clamped in between in his lips, Benton exudes his characteristic, cultivated machismo. In Thomas Hart Benton, A Life, Justin Wolff examines the same photo, positing that

Benton experienced the same erotic feelings as the god while he painted. Wolff comments: “...He experiences the titillation, and even enacts the voyeurism, that Persephone illustrates.”85 Benton admitted feeling attraction towards the model for Persephone, a young woman named Imogene

Bruton who also acted in short commercial advertisements.86 “The model was a beautiful girl…I saw her the other day and she’s more beautiful than ever” Benton remarked to a journalist for the

Indianapolis Sunday Star in 1939.87

Moreover, the allegorical similarities between the painted myth and Benton’s life go even further than Benton’s appreciative remarks. In a biographical reading of the painting, as suggested by both Wolff and Adams, Persephone could symbolize the Joplin prostitute to whom

Benton lost his virginity. Benton, as quoted by Adams, described the Joplin woman as “a black- haired young slut who wore a flaming red kimono and did her hair in curls…”88 The fact that

Benton’s springtime Persephone, with raven hair styled in curls, reclines upon what could plausibly be a (red) kimono guides their symbolic, biographical reading of the painting.89

85 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 264.

86 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 287.

87 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 266.

88 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 289.

89 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 265 and Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 289.

Eroticizing Themes of Rape and Voyeurism: Benton Joins the Canonical Precedents

At the root of Benton’s depictions of Persephone and Susanna are stories of violence: tales of voyeurism, abduction, and rape; themes that artists have depicted for centuries, especially under the veneer of allegory. Wolff suggests that Benton originally planned on titling

Persephone “The Rape of Persephone,” but omitted the first three words in a likely act of self- preservation.90 By choosing to modernize a theme from Greek mythology, and by painting a reclining female nude, Benton tied his ambitions to a long tradition in western art history. His homework was well done: despite his self- mythologizing as an anti-intellectual artist Benton was far from uneducated in the history of art. In Persephone, he borrowed the compositional design from Correggio’s Jupiter and Antiope, and also references a myriad of canonical works that depict rape as a celebratory subject (some illustrating the very the same myth, as seen in

Bernini's The Rape of Proserpina.) By draping Persephone across a swatch of rich carmine cloth, he also makes an allusion to the Venetian Renaissance tradition of nude Venuses reclined on white and red fabric—Giorgione da Castelfranco's Sleeping Venus is an immediate example.

Diane Wolfthal's study Images of Rape: The Heroic Tradition and Its Alternatives provides a framework for discussing Benton's portrayal of what Wolfthal deems “heroic” rape, borrowing the term from Susan Brownmiller. According to both Brownmiller and Wolfthal, a

“heroic” rape is committed by a god or heroic figure.91 In ancient Greece, myths depicting rape were frequently eroticized as well, serving as titillating subject matter and often appearing on objects such as symposium vases to encourage erotic passion.92 Wolfthal's examples of the

90 Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, 265.

91 Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The "heroic" Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7.

92 Ibid., 21.

debauched pursuits of Jupiter and other Gods are reflected in subjects that have been painted and sculpted by numerous European male artists: Correggio in Jupiter and Io (1530s), Titian in Rape of Europa (1559-62) Giambologna in Rape of the Sabine Women (1583) and Bartolommeo di

Giovanni in Rape of the Sabines (ca. 1488).93 To this list we may also add Bernini's The Rape of

Proserpina (1622) as another example of a canonical artwork depicting “heroic” rape. Benton’s

Persephone (and Susanna) do not include writhing figures or a sense of terror. In this way,

Benton’s paintings fall into the same category as Correggio’s Jupiter and Io: an eroticized image glossing over the details of abduction and assault, a transfiguration of trauma into titillation contingent upon the unawareness or complicity of the depicted female subject. Of course, this artistic strategy was most likely chosen to make the stories into something more palatable.

Benton has followed the lead of artists before him by sanitizing and aestheticizing a moment from a rape narrative. In his painting, depicting the moment before she is even aware of

Pluto’s admiration, Persephone shows no sign of distress: she is untouched and unruffled. By choosing to portray the moment before the abduction, Benton allows Pluto (and the viewer) to freely observe Persephone's supple figure while she appears aloof, meeting neither the gaze of the lecherous Pluto nor the viewer. With eyes open and cast sideways, the mythical character seems unaware of the voyeurs who look upon her body, yet her pose elicits the male gaze. Thus

Benton painted a fantasy version of a beautiful woman, daydreaming by a stream, a relaxed figure readily available to the male gaze, yet at the same time her body is clearly posed, taut, with breasts that defy gravity's normal limits: an image of a woman to be appraised.

There exists a tension between the real and the ideal in Benton's image. The pose in which Benton chose to paint Persephone supports the analysis that pin-ups were used as a source of inspiration. In particular, Persephone resembles the type of cheesecake images that include

93 Ibid., 7-35. 42

women in a state of nudity or near nudity, whose privacy is being violated. These types of pin- ups feature women in scenes inherently instilled with male voyeurism, where someone could

“happen-upon” their nakedness: at the beach, changing clothes, or bathing, as Persephone prepares to do.94 Some are even abstractly depicted as if viewed through the keyhole into their room, as an image by Peter Driben illustrates [Figure 14].

Justifying Assault, and How Susanna and Persephone Differ

Often in Western canonical images of rape a moral message is attached, regardless that it is usually undercut by the imagery itself, and as Diane Wolfthal demonstrates, scholars continue this tradition of ignoring the implied violence. Wolfthal brings up two troubling aspects of the syntax that many scholars use when aestheticizing the subject of “heroic” rape. In order to sanitize a rape narrative, from its depiction to its scholarly reception, artists and critics seem to address the questions, “Is the Victim Willing?” and “Is She Pretty?” using both to justify their glossing over of the inherent horrors of sexual assault.95 Showing rape victims as willing, or at least not objecting, was a strategy frequently used to make rape narratives more pleasant—a spoonful of sugar to help the viewer swallow an inherently frightening subject. Such canonical examples are Titian’s Rape of Europa and certainly Correggio’s Jupiter and Io96 [Figure 15].

Similarly, Wolfthal notes, critics seem to justify assault if the victim is plain or average in appearance, which may seem contrary to many opinions that beauty can attract negative attention.97 To many viewers, Benton’s image of Persephone depicts a beautiful woman, but to

94 Breazeale, "In Spite of Women,” 13.

95 Wolfthal, Images of Rape, 33.

96 Ibid., 7-35.

97 Ibid. 33. 43

some, apparently, she was not pretty enough. Quoted by Henry Adams, art historian Milton

Brown held that Persephone was “prettier than Susanna” yet too reminiscent of “sex-starved mid-western schoolteachers.”98 Through this we are reminded of the phrase that has become disturbingly ubiquitous when rationalizing assault where a woman was perceived to be demonstrating precipitant behavior: she was asking for it.99

It is concerning that Benton chose to portray Persephone, who suffers abduction and rape at the hands of Pluto, as sexy, nubile, and available for the taking (and gazing). Susanna, who in the Apocryphal story escapes her persecutors without bodily harm by insisting on her moral virtue and refusing to be threatened, is depicted by Benton as a less glamorous, slightly older woman, who is preparing to skinny-dip or bathe in a rural stream. The apocryphal account of

Susanna and the Elders tells of a lovely married woman, who, while alone in her garden, is spied upon by local religious Elders. The Elders attempt to coerce her into sexual congress, threatening that if she resists, slanderous rumors about an affair with a local young man will be spread around the town. Susanna eschews the advances of the Elders, who keep their word in spreading the gossip. In the end she receives justice after the Elders are put on trial and fail to agree upon which tree they supposedly witnessed Susanna and the young man copulating under. Only one

Elder suggests an oak tree, and they are caught in their lie.100

Benton’s less celebratory approach to Susanna’s anatomy, including his rather fastidious attention to her pubic hair, is at odds with other canonical representations of Susanna, who is

98 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 290.

99 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), 354.

100 Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 185.

often shown in a crouching Venus, or Venus pudica pose to highlight her modesty.101 Benton’s

Susanna is depicted in a situation that suggests both seduction and threat, with the gestures of the two male farmers in the background. She is not depicted in direct peril, as struggling, or pushing away lewd observers who are close to her, as in some European paintings. Nor does she greet the viewer with a beckoning gaze, as in Guiseppe Cesari d’Arpino’s version of Susanna and the

Elders where she coquettishly wrings dry her hair.102 While Benton does not present viewers with an expressly seductive theme, his image remains provocative by combining Susanna’s full frontal nudity (complete with erect nipples) with the illicit themes present in the narrative.

Again, Benton’s presentation allows viewers to identify with the male gaze, casting them in a voyeuristic position similar to that of the snooping Elders. To borrow the words of Mary D.

Garrard’s feminist analysis of another work, here Benton adheres to a masculine interpretation,

“drawn by instinct to identify more with the villains than with the heroine.”103 Yet, as suggested by scholar Bram Dijkstra in Naked, The Nude in America, something about Susanna’s susceptible position and blissful unawareness of the Elder’s (and the viewer’s) eyes upon her might awaken a sense of protectiveness in the spectator.104 Perhaps by portraying Susanna in a state of private reverie, Benton evokes a sense of guilt in the viewer for our unobstructed observation of her nude body.

In contrast to Persephone, the provincial pin-up, Benton seems to have thought of his image of Susanna somewhat differently. Unlike the other “too-nude nude,” Susanna’s pose is neither welcoming nor graphically sensual. She appears to be an older (married) woman,

101 Ibid., 196.

102 Ibid., 188.

103 Ibid., 194.

104 Dijkstra, Naked: The Nude in America, 235.

yellowed and slightly withered, with more visible, natural pubic hair, which is barely shown in

Persephone, Benton’s bar-room nude. When Benton’s friend Archie Musick attempted to call

Susanna another bar-room nude, Benton displayed a peculiar indignation, replying “don’t you know…that bar-room nudes do not have hair on their pussys?”105 Thus, Benton was particular about what constituted the “right” type of nude that belonged in a bar-room—and it certainly did not include pubic hair. Because body hair was not included in girlie illustrations, Benton may have felt that this detail made his illustration of Susanna somehow more attuned to the originating Biblical story and less intentionally sensual than Persephone’s image.

Looking critically at Susanna and Persephone helps us understand how Benton interpreted female bodies through the lens of 1930s popular culture and ancient lore. Examining the mythical and Biblical sources that inspired Susanna and Persephone offers a deeper understanding of the paintings, illuminating similarities between Benton’s own life and the decade during which he painted them. The significance of Benton’s sanitized versions of the

Rape of Persephone and Susanna and the Elders is revealed when we look to canonical precedents and Greek mythology, in addition to the popular culture sources that likely inspired

Benton. For in both Persephone and Susanna, Benton walked a fine line between high art and obscenity. Packaged inside a commercial aesthetic and neatly wrapped in mythology, both paintings represent Benton’s attempt to court high and low art. Yet through this gesture, by referencing his canonical precedents particularly in Persephone (Correggio and Titian among others) he joined them, creating an erotic image out of a violent story, continuing an artistic tradition where rape narratives are aestheticized in the pursuit of visual pleasure.

105 Adams, Thomas Hart Benton, An American Original, 286. 46

CONCLUSION

By aestheticizing the violent tales of the Rape of Persephone and the story of Susanna and the Elders, Benton adhered to the tradition of artists like Titian and Correggio, and in turn made the violent narratives into erotic subjects. This goes deeper yet when acknowledging the parallel between pin-ups used as titillating material in the 1930s, and the nudes created by old masters that were likely used for similar purposes centuries before him. Persephone further speaks to the inherent eroticized male gaze by resembling a pin-up and depicting an ancient tale imbedded with voyeurism. By choosing to create a contemporary mythical nude that referenced commercial sexual imagery of the1930s, Benton not only pokes fun at artists leering at their models, but likely played on contemporary viewers who leered at salacious pin-up magazines.

Benton's jest is multivalent.

Benton claimed that when painting Persephone and Susanna he did not try to make them as explicit as Titian's nude in the Uffizi.106 It is hard to say whether the two nudes, with the inclusion of Susanna's visible pubic hair are more or less “explicit” than Titian's Venus of

Urbino, the painting to which Benton was referring, but they are equally (if not more so, in the case of Susanna) unblushing in their depictions of the naked female form.107

It is important to consider the opinions that women held about sexualized female imagery during the interwar years. The witnesses for and against Esquire magazine in the initial Post

Office board hearings demonstrate the layered meanings that pin-ups and pretty girl imagery held for female viewers. However, the positive remarks of Cook and Weissman are highly problematic given the gender imbalance inherent in magazines like Esquire, and later Playboy, which contained sexualized images created by men for men, without offering an equivalent to

106 Benton, An Artist in America, 280.

107 Ibid. 47

women on the mass market. I can comfortably speculate that women gleaned visual pleasure, certainly, by looking at the handsome figure of actors such as Cary Grant in films, yet it was the eroticized female figure, not male, that was ubiquitous in 1930s popular culture, and women recognized the female body as the primary symbol of sexual pleasure.108 Even further, seductive images of women were used to advertise to women by the 1920s, no doubt playing to the culturally induced insecurity about their appearance—after all, women were expected to keep the house clean and look beautiful while doing it.109 A “Petty Boy” drawn by famed pin-up artist

George Petty, did appear in some swimsuit advertisements for a Jantzen swimsuit ad campaign,110 but the muscular male almost always appeared alongside a woman.

Popular culture projected the acceptable yet narrow definitions of womanhood to

Americans during the 1930s. As an example, Leon Errol in Her Majesty, Love (1931), posits that females fall only into three categories: “ladies, women, and cuties.”111 Considering that women in the 1930s (and beyond) were expected to conform to accepted models of behavior, appearance, and moral values, it is not surprising that films (and print media) mirrored these acceptable gender roles.112 In relation to the topic of Persephone, Sarah B. Pomeroy showed that goddesses were archetypal models of female characters, but only with one or two desirable personality traits rather than an entire spectrum making up a nuanced personality, similar to what scholars have demonstrated when writing about women's roles in 1930s movies. Throughout the decade, movies, advertisements, and the content of magazines presented women with a narrow

108 Meyerowitz, “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material,” 12.

109 Winship, Inside Women's Magazines, 19.

110 Martignette and Meisel, The Great American Pin-Up, 329

111 Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 (New York: Knopf, 1993), 35.

112 Ibid., 36. 48

group of stereotypical roles that were usually tied to their appearance or function as sexual objects.

Pin-ups and pretty girl artwork may have appealed to Benton as part of the unique social fabric of American life. Illustrations by Roy Best and Art Frahm [Figure 16 and Figure 17], are two more typical examples of the types of pin-ups that circulated during the interwar years.

While there are thousands of these types of illustrations in existence, these two are given as examples for their striking similarity to the pose in which Benton portrays Persephone reclining.

Of course, the pose he selected in part can be traced to the model he used for Persephone, who was captured in a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt. The model, Imogene Bruton, was herself a commercial actress, and thus, art mimics life, and life mimics art. Benton was committed to painting reality, and claimed to use a farmer as a model when painting a farmer and so on. On this subject he remarked, “when I represent a nightclub girl I get one of them too”113 Thus, in order to paint the American experience Benton used the American experience as his model.

Commercial imagery likely appealed to Benton not for its subtly, but as a ubiquitous part of

American culture. Pulling from these types of material to create in Persephone an American nude was likely a strategy that operated on several levels: it was a humorous acknowledgement of the revered European female nude and an attempt to equalize his new American pictorial tradition with the European one with which he'd broken. Benton was at once aligning himself with European art and breaking from it, making a visual jest at old master nudes while creating his own American Venus.

113 Benton, An Artist In America, 255. 49

ILLUSTRATIONS

Note: Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations are unable to be reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are can be found in the hard copy version on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Art Center, American University, Washington, D.C.

Figure 1: Thomas Hart Benton, Persephone, 1938-1939, Egg tempera and oil on linen over panel, 72 1/8 x 56 1/16 (183.2 x 142.4 cm), Kansas City, Missouri: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.

Figure 6: Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Antiope (also called Venus, Satyr and Cupid), 1523- 1528, Oil on canvas, 74 x 49 in, Paris, France: The Louvre.

Figure 7: Rolf (Jack) Armstrong, Venus, 1934, Original location unknown.

Figure 8: Earle K. Bergey, Untitled,1 934-1936. Original location unknown.

Figure 9: Earl Moran, Grin and Bear It, 1937, Illustration for the Combination Door Company.

Figure 10: Earl Moran, Some Baby, 1939, Illustration for Metal Crafters.

Figure 11: Students and Faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1907, original location unknown

Figure 12: Unknown artist, Billy Rose and a Chorus Girl Pose with Persephone at the Diamond Horseshoe, 1941, original location unknown.

Figure 13: Alfred Eisenstaedt, Thomas Hart Benton Painting the Rape of Persephone, 1938, Gelatin silver print, 10¾ x 9½ in, original location unknown.

Figure 14: Peter Driben, Untitled, ca. 1940s, original location unknown.

Figure: 15 Antonio Allegri da Correggio, Jupiter and Io, 1530, Oil on canvas, 163.5 cm × 70.5 cm (64.4 in × 27.8 in), Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Figure: 16 Roy Best, Untitled, ca. 1930-1950, original location unknown.

Figure: 17 Art Frahm, Untitled, ca. 1935-1960, original location unknown.

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